Incentives & Rewards

An incentive is money or possibly a reward that you would sent to the respondent or participants to encourage to participate in an engagement.

It is good to show your customers, participants or respondents that you value their opinion and time. Giving them a nudge for telling you how they truly feel about your product or services and reassuring them that their feedback is not going to waste.

There two types of incentives that you can offer respondents:

1. Monetary Incentive: This could include cash, airtime e.t.c

2. Non- Monetary Incentive: This could be gifts like a branded pen or notebook

Research shows that non-monetary incentives like a thank-you gift aren’t as effective as monetary incentives when it comes to increasing response rates. Research has also shown that offering incentives for a survey respondent’s time is one way to increases response rates.

Pros of Using Incentives

Offering incentives can be an effective way to engage your target audience.

When introducing a new product or service, you can use incentives to find out how they feel about your product/services

Cons of Using Incentives

It is prone to abuse. The general public might be highly motivated to take advantage of the offer and participate unnecessarily in the survey.

For research or market research purposes you may not get “true” or get corrupted data as respondents may give more positive responses and may give meaningless answers by just selecting on the first response just to get the reward

Incentives & Rewards in Echo Mobile

Getting Started with Incentives

Set your budget: Set a budget that you intend to use for this feature. Send an email to support@echomobile.org with the subject “Use of Incentive Feature” and include your use case and the budget for the estimated number of people you intend to reward using this feature. This is to help us advice on optimal way of setting this up.

Know your target population or audience: Youth may prefer having an airtime rewards compared to a farmer who may prefer an MPESA top up incentive. Their occupation may also determine the amount for example a high-value incentive for doctors would preferable as they are often very busy, so the amount has to be high enough to make it worth their time to respond.

Decide if every respondent gets your incentive: This would determine how you will deliver the incentive, will it be upon survey completes or will you use coupon codes that will go out to contacts based on response to certain questions

Survey Length: If you are using a survey and applying a reward to it,how long will it take to complete the survey? How much should you compensate the respondent for their time.

Recipientscannot receive an airtime top-up within 5 minutes of the last topup

Outside of East Africa, Echo Mobile supports PINless Airtime Transfer (direct to SIM airtime topup). However, in some countries only specific values of airtime transfers can be made, and values vary for each carrier.

MPESA Payment Incentives

In Kenya, Echo Mobile supports M-PESA incentive payments on Safaricom network up from a minimum of KES 50 to a maximum of KES 1,000 per transfer. Echo Mobile charges 3% of the transaction value. An M-PESA transfer fee
of KES 15 (for registered and unregistered M-PESA recipients) is also
charged for each transaction

Recipientscannot receive an MPESA payment top-up within 5 minutes of the last payment.

As incentive setups and pricing are country specific, please reach out to support@echomobile.org if you would like more information on setups and pricing

Setting up Incentives on Echo Mobile

Echo Mobile can facilitate the monetary incentives in form of airtime incentives (Invitation Incentive & Completion Incentive) and payment incentives (MPESA top up)*. The rewards can only be offered upon receiving/participating in a survey, completing a survey, successfully registering a product or redeeming a coupon code.

You can getting started in setting up incentives on the Echo Mobile Platform with: